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Partnering with zulily – A Facebook Perspective

During F8, Facebook’s global developer conference (March 25-26, 2015), Facebook announced a new program with zulily as one of the launch partners: Messenger for Business. Just a month later, the service was live and in production! We on the zulily engineering team truly enjoyed the partnership with Facebook on this exciting product launch. It’s been a few months since the launch and we reached out to Rob Daniel, senior Product Manager at Messenger, to share his team’s experience on collaborating with zulily.

Here’s what Rob had to say:

How Messenger for Business Started

Messenger serves over 700 million active people with the mission of reinventing and improving everyday communication. We invest in performance, reliability, and the core aspects of a trusted and fast communication tool. Furthermore, we build features that allow people to better express themselves to their friends and contacts, including through stickers, free video and voice calling, GIFs, and other rich media content. We build the product to be as inclusive as possible – even supporting people that prefer to register for Messenger without a Facebook account – because we know that the most important feature of a messaging app is that all your friends and anyone you’d want to speak with is reachable, instantly.

In that vein, we found that some of people’s most important interactions are not just with friends and family, but with businesses they care about and interact with almost every day. However, until recently Messenger didn’t fully support a robust channel for communicating with these businesses. And when we looked at how people interact with businesses today – email, phone (typically…IVR phone trees), text – there were obvious drawbacks. Either the channels were nosiy (email), or lacked richeness (text), or were just really heavyweight and inefficient (voice).

Reinventing How People Communicate with Businesses

When we started talking with zulily about a partnership to reinvent how people communicate with businesses, under the mission of creating a delightful and high utility experience, we found we met an incredible match.

Why? Simply put, zulily thinks about Mom first. That’s the same people-centric approach to building products that’s at the heart of Messenger. And along the way, as we scoped out the interactions for launch, it was evident that we had the same mindset: build a product with incredible utility and value to people, establish a relationship and build trust, and over time build interactions that pay dividends via higher customer loyalty and lifetime value. And despite time pressures and the many opportunities to put business values over people values, we collectively held the line that people were first, business was second.

We also found that “zulily Speed” was no joke, and matched the Facebook mantra of “Move Fast.” Up and through our announcement at F8 (Facebook’s two-day developer conference) and launch later the next month, our two teams moved in sync at incredible speed. As an example, late one evening an issue was spotted by a Messenger engineer and by 10:00 am the next morning the problem had been identified, fixed and pushed to production. That kind of turn around time and coordination is just unheard of between companies at zulily and Facebook’s scale.

Speaking to the strength of the individual engineers on both sides, team sizes were small. This led to quick decision making and efficient, frequent communications between teams, forming a unique bond of trust and transparency. Despite the distance between Seattle and Menlo Park, we rarely had timing miscues and latency was incredibly low.

This Journey is 1% Finished

At Facebook we say “this journey is 1% finished,” highlighting that regardless of our past accomplishments we have a long journey ahead, and that we owe people that use our services so much more. And in that same spirit, we respect that Messenger is only beginning to provide zulily and other businesses the communication capabilities they need to form lasting, trusted, and valuable relationships with their customers. But we’re thrilled to be teamed up with a company, like zulily, that has the commitment and vision alignment to help shape the experience along the way and see the opportunity along the path ahead.